Reika dependency manager and buid tool

khinsen

At first sight, it looks more complicated to install Reika than any of the existing options for building Common Lisp projects. But I didn't try.

marcuskammer

khinsen I can second this. Looking at the description my first impression is "seems more complicate".

amoroso

As far as I know Reika depends only on Fossil, Crystal, and Git which on Debian derivatives can be installed once with just sudo apt install fossil crystal git (or via a GUI software manager), something users are likely familiar with. For the rest it requires a single configuration file per project supplied by the developer. It doesn't seem that complicated.

khinsen

OK, if you assume Debian, that may be fine.

I am taking the Lisp developer perspective, my question is then "Could I recommend Reika as a way to install my code?" That means lots of platforms (counting each Linux distro as a different one).

Not that I have anything clearly better to propose. My impression is that SBCL + Quicklisp + Ultralisp is the least-effort cross-platform approach nowadays, but many (non-Lisp) people tell me that it's too complex for them.

ggxx

amoroso It kind of reminds me of Vend which also downloads dependencies such that they're local.

One downside of vend from when I experimented with it was that your dependency has to be in registry.lisp or it won't work. Thankfully, the author is very willing to accept pull requests, and he is still actively maintaining it. I'm not sure how Reika fares in comparison.

khinsen

ggxx This relates to an important distinction between two kinds of package managers:

Curated collections (Quicklisp, Vend, Debian, Guix, ...)
Open-for-all registers (Ultralisp, NPM, ...)

marcoxa

amoroso it depends on the command line.

amoroso

marcoxa Can you elaborate?

marcoxa

amoroso if it is Lisp (CL, better) the only "CLI" should be the "REPL".

amoroso

marcoxa Sure, for Lispers. But Reika addresses an audience of non Lispers only familiar with the CLI.

marcoxa

amoroso oh well. Sounds a bit like "vim is addressing the needs of people who do not know Emacs" (and M-x evil) :) :) :)

marcoxa

khinsen The dimension I am interested in is "CL based" vs "CLI" (actually "Linux-mostly-FU-windows-users-and-Mac-users-too").

In this respect, Quicklisp is "CL based".